Friday round-up

Posted Fri, January 18th, 2013 10:17 am by Rachel Sachs

Thursday’s coverage of the court continued to focus on this week’s oral arguments. For this blog, Ronald Mann reports on Wednesday’s oral argument in Gunn v. Minton, in which the Court is considering whether federal jurisdiction over cases “arising under” the federal patent law extends to a claim of legal malpractice in a patent case. The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law also held a post-argument discussion, available here (video).

Briefly:

At her On the Case blog for Reuters, Alison Frankel discusses the merits brief filed on Wednesday by the respondents in Bowman v. Monsanto Co., in which the Court will consider how the doctrine of patent exhaustion might apply to self-replicating technologies, such as Monsanto’s patented seeds. She concludes that, “[w]hatever you think about genetically modified food, this is a case to watch.”

JURIST and the Montgomery Advertiser both report on the cert. petition filed on Tuesday by the Alabama Attorney General, seeking review of the Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision striking down portions ofAlabama’s immigration law on preemption grounds.

At the Blog of Legal Times, Tony Mauro reports on the memorial service held yesterday for Frank Lorson, the former Chief Deputy Clerk of the Supreme Court, who passed away last Friday.

At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr analyzes the dynamic between President Obama and Chief Justice Roberts in the context of other President-Chief Justice relationships in American history.

At Dorf on Law, Eric Segall considers the two cases the Court will hear this Term implicating concerns of racial equality, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (involving the University’s use of race in undergraduate admissions decisions) and ShelbyCountyv. Holder (involving the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act). Segall argues that “the Court is likely to reject efforts by elected and politically accountable governmental officials to further the cause of racial progress.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys work for or contribute to this blog in various capacities, was among the counsel to the American Association of Law Schools, which filed an amicus brief in Fisher.]

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices will meet for their December 9 conference; our list of "petitions to watch" for that conference is available here.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.